Skip to main content

Of Selfies and Hashtags

Vanity has a new name...and a new face...and all it takes is a click on the front camera of your phone to be deemed "cool". One of the biggest internet fads of recent times, the "Selfie" has amassed quite a number of followers for itself. Who would have thought that clumsily taken self-clicked pictures of yourself from your phone could tell the world how tuned in you were to the latest trends?

Lets face it...its really not so simple to take a decent selfie! To start with, its confusing where to look...you may be staring at the screen of your phone and smiling stupidly at it, and your selfie may just turn out to be a cock-eyed version of yourself. Group selfies are even tougher, getting all of them in one frame requires creativity for sure, as on most occassions, you would be left with a ear or half a face in the picture. Full kudos to Ellen DeGeneres for being able to accomodate all those hollywood biggies in one frame, but I'm guessing not many of us look all that great with out faces cramped next to each other!

But posting a selfie or your tweet isn't enough anymore. You need to use the eponymous hashtag to tell people what this really means...like an inked finger after polling has to have #Elections2014 just in case people thought you were playing around with your niece's fountain pen or something. If SMS murdered the English language and gave us weird spellings and bizzare abbreviations, Hashtags went a step ahead and did away with the space between words. So its not uncommon to come across hashtags stretching right across your screen, multiple hashtags being popular too. On the flip side though, I have, on more than one occasion, curbed the desire to comment on the hashtag overdrive that people exercise...maybe something like #Ridiculous #Annoying #Irritated #By #Use #Of #Unnecessary #Hashtags!

I don't have anything against selfies or hashtags or any other of these fads,really. I find them amusing and have used them myself many times, though not with great results every time ( a selfie with a hyperactive pup was never meant to be easy, eh?). But it is nice to try new things that seem to have suddenly caught the worlds fancy...after all, it is all about keeping up with the times, right? #JustAnotherScribble

Comments

  1. I can't take a proper selfie, so i kinda jealous about the beautiful selfie clickers :P :P


    ~S(t)ri Writes

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hahaha...I know..I feel the same way...and the Deepika Padukone selfie ad doesn't help either, does it? :-P

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sisterhood of Medicine

"Sister, when will the Doctor be here?", asked a middle aged man. I turned from my examination table, where I was examining a six year old boy, and replied, " I am the doctor, how can I help you?". The man looked at me doubtfully - I was in a salwar kameez with my stethoscope around my neck - and repeated - " No but Sister, I need my child to be seen by a Doctor  Sir".   This is only one of the many incidents that I- as well as most of my young female colleagues at work- go through on a daily basis. Young female doctors get mistaken for nurses all the time, although the nursing staff always has a specific uniform. The young male doctors, however, do not encounter any such confusion. I have no idea whether I can label this as casual sexism or pure ignorance, but people across social and economic spectrums tend to address female doctors as "Sister" as opposed to "Madam". The men, however, get to be "Sir" throughout.  S

The Saree and its Excess Baggage

As a lanky young girl in her late teens who first stepped into Medical School, I gawked in horror when I was told that I was supposed to wear sarees to classes for a month or so as part of the college tradition for all Freshers. That the whole saree thing was to be accompanied by drippingly oiled hair parted in the middle and braided with the ends tied with fluorescent orange and green ribbons is another story in itself, of course. But for the eighteen year old me, who didn't really care how she looked, the oiled hair wasn't an issue as much as the saree was - simply because I had absolutely no clue how to drape one.  Cut to a little over a decade later, as a newly married woman, the women of my husband's family and extended family are pleasantly surprised as to just how comfortably I drape my sarees, not requiring the help that was very generously offered by a bevy of aunts and sisters in law. Somewhere in these past few years, I fell in love with this quintessential

The Matter of the Root.

In a country where your name (more importantly, your surname) is more or less a reflection of your identity- from where you belong down to your caste and religion- imagine having a name that doesn't pin you down to a certain state or territory or region, even. Given that situation, I have now come to simply laugh off the surprised reactions I get when people realise I am Assamese. I have had colleagues who simply assumed I was Bengali for years,friends of friends enquiring which part of Delhi or Punjab I am from and even random aunties at weddings judging me for gorging on chicken because apparently, I am a Marwari! I usually laugh the whole thing off, sometimes even playing a guessing game with the people who seem hellbent on decoding where I actually am from. But somewhere at the back of my mind, over the years, a nagging question has kept building up in my mind--a question I have tried to answer very many times, although not very satisfactorily--- What does being an Assamese